The truth of the matter is that people say that there are different strokes for different folks, and I think that applies more often than not, particularly in times like these, which can be confusing, especially when it comes to corporations, so whatever “stroke” feels most natural to you is the “stroke” I hope you used to swim through the manuals, and the same goes for when it comes to the “stroke” you are and will continue to be using as you swim through the rest of this paper, even if it is/they are different from the “stroke” or “strokes” I am or seem to be suggesting.
Thesis and Discussion
Some people will say anything to sell you what they are trying to sell you, especially if those people are corporations. It’s shady. Graham&Swords Corporation is a really great example of what I am talking about here. The history of the way they sell cures is the proof.
My father was one of the first people in the world to ever own a cure. He saved the manual (the 1988 one on the left side of the pages you just read) that came with the EmergeRig, which I found in a box of old stuff in one of our houses. It was packaged much differently than EmergeRigs are packaged today, and wasn’t even called an EmergeRig at the time. It was called a HatchKit, which I will soon show is just one of the many examples of how some people will say anything to sell you what they’re trying to sell you, especially if they’re corporations, which is the thesis of this, my final research paper.
The thing about it is that calling an EmergeRig a HatchKit isn’t even the biggest difference at all between that original manual, which came out in 1988, and the latest manual, which came out in 2012. For example, they don’t call cures “cures” or even “Curios” in the original manual because what they call them is “Botimals.” And that is still just not even beginning to start to really crack into the surface of the differences between these two manuals, as you may or may not have noticed above.
The main thought I have about these manuals is that the old manual talked about cures like they were animals instead of machines. Instead of emerging from marbles, they hatched from ova, which is a Latin word for eggs. Instead of body heat, they needed simple human warmth. They could grieve and they could die. They ate LifePellets instead of WorkPellets. Instead of functioning, they lived.
And living isn’t functioning. Obviously.
Graham&Swords called them robots at the very beginning of the original manual because that’s what they were and are and it would probably be illegal in a false advertising way or something to not disclose that, but the rest of the manual talks about them like they have real emotions and desires. That is all very obvious, too.
But if they wanted people to think of them as animals, then you have to ask why it is that they called them Botimals, which is an ugly-sounding word that sounds like lobotomy and I bet I could find in some old sci-fi movie with laser guns and spaceships and talking computers that beam you or whatever, and I think the answer is that Graham&Swords just didn’t know what they were doing yet when they first started selling cures/Botimals. I think they not only didn’t understand how people would interact with cures/Botimals, which is a separate thing that I’ll write about in the next paragraph, but they didn’t know much about branding because, first of all, it was the 1980s, and people were still pretty unsophisticated about how to use branding, but secondly because, until they came out with cures/Botimals, Graham&Swords made most of its money making large weapons like nuclear submarines and jet fighters for the US Army, so they weren’t used to selling stuff to normal people and just didn’t really know how to do it. I think that if the above reasons I just gave for why they called cures Botimals are not the real reasons, then the real reasons will forever remain a complete and total utter mystery that will never be solved. There is a kid in this class who says microwaved pizzas are better than fresh, handmade pizzas, and he doesn’t just say it, either. He believes it. I have had him over more than once and given him the choice. And he always makes the microwaved choice. And it’s not because he’s low on funds—he’s always my guest, so I pay either way. And it’s not because he’s so hungry he can’t wait for the handmade to get delivered—I always ask my guests what they’ll want to eat for dinner first thing when they arrive at any of my houses so that I can have that dinner sent for/made ready at whatever time we’ve determined we should eat dinner, which is rarely less than two hours after their arrival, and never less than an hour after their arrival, which I make clear to them when I first invite them over (for example, “Come over on Saturday at four,” I might say, “and we’ll make a short film, then eat dinner around seven.”), so they know not to show up too hungry. And it’s not because he’s uncomfortable with me paying a lot for a handmade instead of a little for a microwaved. I know that because when it comes to anything else I pay for, like pints of ice cream or energy drinks, he always goes for the pricier kind. And it’s definitely not because it’s cooler to like microwaved more than handmade—microwaved is bland and cheap and, for reasons I can’t exactly explain, kind of immature and girl-repelling. There is a small chance he secretly hates me and knows that I prefer handmade pizza to microwaved pizza but that because he’s my guest I will eat the microwaved instead of the handmade to be a good host even though I’ll wish we got the handmade, and so even though he’d rather have the handmade himself he suffers eating microwaved for the thrill of watching me eat microwaved while I wish it was handmade, but it’s a very small chance because then why would he even hang out with me if he hated me that much? That would be almost psychopathic, I think. So, unless he’s psychopathic, you have to believe this kid really does believe microwaved is better than handmade, and the only explanation for that can be that he’s not that bright. Maybe he’s even a little bit stupid. Sometimes people are just stupid. And sometimes people just have bad taste, too. That’s another possible explanation. Or it might be the same explanation. Sometimes one looks like the other, bad taste and stupidity, and it might be that sometimes they’re actually exactly the same thing. I’m getting off track a little because I have a hard enough time, as an artist, trying to think about art that is really art without trying to think about things that are not really art—like corporate branding—as if they were art. I’m trying, though. What I think I’m getting at is that Graham&Swords Corp. thought Botimals was a good name for their product because they were stupid/lacked taste, and that shouldn’t be hard for anyone to imagine, even if it’s impossible to explain beyond saying that their taste was bad or their branding instincts were stupid. Not everything is subtle and on purpose, even when it should be. They called it a Botimal because they thought that was a good thing to call it, and they were wrong. End of story.
The more important thing to think about in terms of what’s shady, is how people interacted with Botimals/cures. The way it got explained to me by Tessa Swords, who’s Xavier Swords’s granddaughter, and who used to be my babysitter (Tessa is my godsister, or whatever you call your godfather’s daughter—her father, Baron Swords, is my godfather), was that, originally, cures were supposed to be just like other pets, but not messy or smelly or in need of much training. So that is why it would make sense that Graham&Swords would want to talk about Botimals/cures in the original manual like they were alive, like dogs and etc. That way they could plant the idea in the user who read the manual that that’s how it was, that cures/Botimals weren’t just machines that were substitutes for pets but were actually animals, which they thought would sell lots of Botimals/cures. And it did for a while. Except, then, a couple things happened.